Discussion questions for Monday, October 3
After reading the questions below and deciding which one(s) you want to respond to (you're expected to respond once every three classes, on average), click on the appropriate thread to write your response as a reply. If you have not yet registered an account with wikispaces and requested to join this site, you will need to do so to post a response (see the How to Wiki page for instructions).
When reading a play like Plautus's Haunted House, from a time and place very different than our own -- in Plautus's case, Rome at the turn of the 2nd Century B.C.E. -- we face a number of problems of translation: literally so, in the case of the shift from ancient Latin to modern English; culturally so, in the sense that references, viewpoints, and personality types that would have been taken for granted by Plautus and his audience often have to be explained to make sense for us. This makes reading ancient comedy a particular challenge, since so much comedy -- though of course not all -- plays on language and on responding to the fleeting concerns of the day, and explaining a joke generally kills it. Nevertheless, what can you make of how comedy is working in this play? What kinds of things -- behavior, language, situation, activity, etc. -- does the play assume its audiences will find funny (quote particular examples)? And how, in your observation, do the sources of the comedy compare to that of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, or Twilight's occasional moments of comedy, or other forms of modern comedy with which you may be familiar (e.g., sitcoms, farces, parodies, gross-out comedies, comedies of manners, improv, etc.)?
While we'll talk more fully in Wednesday's class about the particular conventions of Plautine comedy -- how it was staged, acted, structured, etc. -- you can start thinking today about one of its most recognizable features (and one of its most enduring legacies to more modern forms of comedy): namely, its collection of stock character types. Choose two or three characters from The Haunted House that you might guess are typical of the style of comedy in which Plautus is working -- that is to say, characters like them are likely to show up in other plays by Plautus or other Roman comedy writers. Describe them and analyze their role in the story and their role in creating the play's humor. Choose one character that seems to still exist in modern comedies (plays, movies, television, or internet) and compare its ancient and modern versions? Can you speculate on what your comparison tells us about telling differences or surprising similarities between the ancient and modern need for humor?
After reading the questions below and deciding which one(s) you want to respond to (you're expected to respond once every three classes, on average), click on the appropriate thread to write your response as a reply. If you have not yet registered an account with wikispaces and requested to join this site, you will need to do so to post a response (see the How to Wiki page for instructions).